Fresh From the Labs

In this final episode of Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared reflect on their journey at Pioneer Square Labs, share personal updates, and discuss insights gained from their experiences. Jared provides valuable perspectives on the challenges and responsibilities of using AI in coding, while the group revisits their Freshies predictions about AI trends and tools, evaluating their accuracy...

In this episode of Fresh From the Labs, the team says farewell to engineer-turned-founder Jared as he sets off to co -found a startup. But don't worry, he will still be hosting FFTL from the other side. We delve (kl-note: another AI giveaway! 😅) into the rise of AI-generated resumes and the challenges they pose for recruiters and interviewers. The hosts discuss strategies for detecting synthe...

In this episode we dive into the latest AI news with a playful twist. Anthropic’s new Haiku model hits the scene, promising lightning‑fast responses and powerful capabilities. We unpack what makes Haiku special and how it stacks up. Then we explore Atlas, the emerging AI platform shaking up the ecosystem, and discuss how its features could reshape the way we interact with technology. We also take...

Welcome back to a super special episode of Fresh from the Labs! The team is joined by PSL alum Brian Fioca, now a Solutions Architect at OpenAI, for a deep dive into the latest from Dev Day and the strategies shaping the AI frontier. The conversation kicks off with AgentKit, OpenAI's new visual workflow for building agents, and the accompanying open-source ChatKit. We discuss how these first-p...

This week on Fresh from the Labs, the team dives into OpenAI's Sora 2. More than just an AI video model, it's a full-fledged social network. Kevin shares his shockingly good first experience creating a personalized avatar and generating a video of himself in a 90s rock band, highlighting the platform's surprisingly good sense of humor and the fun of remixing content. This leads to a br...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, the team kicks things off with the resurgence of autonomous driving. With Waymo cars now spotted on the streets of Seattle and Amazon's toaster-like Zoox shuttles rolling out in Vegas, is the long-promised self-driving revolution finally here? We discuss the two-decade journey from Uber's early arbitrage bet to today's tangible progress, debating user...

This week on Fresh from the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared dive into the powerful new Codex CLI release. Based on GPT-5 but custom-trained for real-world agentic use cases, this release confirms their prediction that major labs are now building "first-party agents," moving the key primitive up the stack from the model to the agent itself. Kevin and Jared share their hands-on impressions...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared are back to break down the latest in AI. The conversation kicks off with a look at Google's delightfully named new image editing tool, Nano Banana. Kevin shares his hands-on experience, highlighting its impressive ability to flawlessly edit and compose images in ways that feel genuinely useful, marking a potential step-change for image...

This week on Fresh from the Labs , Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared kick things off with a conversion : Kevin has officially joined the Rust cult (beard pending). From there, we dive into three big themes shaping how builders actually ship with AI right now: GPT-5 in the wild. A launch that felt…bumpy. We unpack autorouter misfires, sudden model deprecations, and why prompting matters more than ever with...

(created with GPT-5...) We hit record three hours after OpenAI’s GPT‑5 live stream, with a shoutout to former PSL engineer Brian Fioca on stage, and dive straight into the big takeaway: daily‑driver frontier at a non‑frontier price. Benchmarks look great, but vibes and real‑world performance steal the show—agentic and MMLU jumps, faster tokens, a huge context window that keeps long tasks on track,...

In this episode, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared unpack the turbulent sequence of events around Windsurf, first the reported collapse of an anticipated OpenAI deal amid Microsoft data-access sensitivities, then Google’s selective leadership and IP licensing move, and finally Cognition’s rapid-fire acquisition of the remaining team. We explore what this “strategic decapitation” style of transaction signal...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared dive into a fresh wave of AI model and product drops. First, they unpack the arrival of Kimi K2, a massive trillion-parameter open-weight model from Moonshot AI that shows compelling performance on coding benchmarks and could be run locally. Next, they discuss Grok 4, which has claimed top spots on key benchmarks but comes with an awkward...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared recount their recent experience at the PSL Cursor Meetup event, diving into the excitement, challenges , and fascinating community engagement. They unpack the audience feedback that revealed surprising preferences in the AI tool debate, specifically comparing Cursor and Claude Code from a developer's perspective. The conversation goes...

Welcome to the first-ever Freshies! In this special mid-year awards episode of Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared celebrate (and debate) the most impactful developments in AI so far this year. The team hands out awards across several exciting categories, including "Best New Model," the year's biggest "Buzzword," and their go-to "Favorite AI Tool." They...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared unpack a whirlwind of major AI developments. The conversation kicks off with OpenAI's significant price drop and the release of O3 Pro, exploring how increased accessibility could reshape the market and what this means for startups. We then shift to Meta's substantial investment in Scale AI, dissecting the potential competitive imp...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared dive into the swirling drama and strategic plays shaping the AI landscape. First up, the Windsurf and Anthropic saga: with rumors of an OpenAI acquisition of Windsurf, Anthropic has reportedly given Windsurf just five days to remove all Anthropic models. We unpack the implications of this aggressive move, from competitive intelligence conc...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, it's a rapid-fire rundown of a jam-packed week in AI releases! Shilpa, Jared, and Kevin share their candid first impressions on a slew of new models and tools. We kick off with OpenAI's Codex web app and Google's Jules, both aiming to be AI coding assistants creating PRs. The consensus? Underwhelming and a bit black-boxy, not quite fitting the desired...

This week on Fresh from the Labs , Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared dive into three headline-grabbing stories, and what they mean for builders right now: Klarna’s customer-support U-turn. The team dissects the "replace 700 agents with AI" experiment, why a two-humans-per-bot fallback isn’t a failure, and what sustainable AI adoption in ops should look like. OpenAI’s new Healthbench. Thousands of curated p...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, Shilpa, Kevin, and Jared are joined by a special guest: Brian Fioca, a former PSL team member now working as a Solutions Architect at OpenAI! Brian shares his insights from the trenches, helping startups leverage OpenAI's APIs for "intelligence as a service." The conversation kicks off with Brian addressing the evergreen startup question: where are the real opport...

This week on Fresh From the Labs, we're looking past the leaderboards and hype to explore the real-world challenges and limitations of today's AI. Can AI actually run a company? We dive into recent CMU research that put AI agents to the test, revealing significant struggles with common sense tasks and complex automation like using a web browser effectively. The conversation unpacks the per...

Welcome back to Fresh From the Labs! Shilpa, Jared, and Kevin dive into another week of AI exploration at Pioneer Square Labs. The conversation kicks off with a deep dive into OpenAI's newly released o3 model. Kevin shares his initial impressions after putting it through its paces, highlighting its impressive intelligence, speed, and surprisingly adept web search capabilities. Jared discusses...

Dive deep into the latest advancements shaking up the AI landscape! In this episode, we unpack the significant release of Meta's Llama 4, exploring its capabilities and the internal dynamics at Meta that drive such innovation. Join the conversation as we tackle the persistent challenges of evaluating AI model performance and discuss industry trends. We then shift focus to the exciting potential of...

Welcome back to "Fresh from the Labs," where the Pioneer Square Labs team (Shilpa, Jared, Kevin) is joined by special guest Brian Fioca (formerly PSL, now heading to OpenAI) to discuss their latest AI experiments and observations. Following up on their previous discussion about "vibe coding," the team shares insights from a recent internal hackathon where non-engineers used too...

In this first episode of Fresh From the Labs , we (Shilpa, Jared, and Kevin from the product team at Pioneer Square Labs) kick things off by sharing why we’re starting this podcast: to give you a window into the AI experiments we're running day to day, and to think out loud with fellow builders. We dive into what’s impressed us lately — especially the leap in image generation from ChatGPT-4o....